Fear Effect

So, Fear Effect for the Playstation ,(at least disk 1), is set in a futuristic CEL shaded Hong Kong. Visually it looks like Bladerunner meets Killer 7. Sounds awesome. So how can they screw this up? When I first played I thought the backgrounds were prerendered with fixed camera angles but when I looked it up I found that it’s actually short clips of looped animation. I had noticed this but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before so I didn’t know what to call it. No wonder this game has to be on four disks. The animated backgrounds look great except that the animations are only like three seconds long. Once you see them loop, (or even freeze), it breaks the immersion. So which is better: stagnant prerendered backgrounds or full motion backgrounds that keep showing the same thing every couple of seconds? Another weird thing about the game is that it’s in letterbox aspect ratio.

While playing, you alternate between controlling three different mercenaries on a team as they try to recover a kidnapped individual. The controls are, to put it mildly, a fucking abysmal pile of horse shit. For starters, the X button is fire. Yes that’s right, the X button; the button that has been ingrained in you as the action button. In third person shooting games there is traditionally an aiming mode that might make X switch to being the fire button for that moment but here it’s just fire plain and simple. So every time you go up to an object you want to investigate, you’re going to end up shooting at it instead. The real action button is triangle which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The square and circle buttons are, get this, your inventory. Yeah… Circle goes forward through your items. Square goes back. What the hell were they thinking? Those four buttons are supposed to be reserved for functions that are important/often used as in actual gameplay and they dedicated half of them to inventory? Lets see, what are we going to need to do a lot of quickly in the heat of battle? Dodging and running? No. Sifting through the various keys that you picked up. That’s going to be the most useful. The shoulder buttons are running, dodging, turning 180 degrees and sneaking. Which ones are which doesn’t matter because you’ll never remember anyway. That’s how intuitive the controls are. You have to actually mentally recall which button did what or just try them until you find it instead of just playing the game.

The controls for movement should be simple and self explanatory but they actually suck too. I don’t know why Sony didn't put analogue sticks on their Playstation controlers until three years after launch. So it’s the new 3D era of games. How do we move in them? Oh I know! A D-pad! That way the player has to zig-zag their character around retardedly and even the simple act of walking through a door takes countless minute adjustments to accomplish. Complain all you want about the fugly three-handed N64 controller but at least Nintendo knew it was time to use sticks. The game actually has support for the analogue stick controller but when you use it... I don't know but somehow the control becomes even worse which is just divide-by-zero mindblowing.

Luckily I'm playing on an emulator so I have free reign of the control assignment. I remapped EVERY SINGLE BUTTON save for the sneak button and the movement controls. And the only reason I didn't change the movement controls is because there's no other option than to have them shitty. Immediately after doing the game designers' job for them, the game is suddenly a significant degree better. That's not to say it doesn't suck in many other ways.

Going back to the so important inventory with two buttons dedicated to it, you have to scroll through it one item at a time in real time. This it really great for when you run out of bullets in the middle of a firefight and need to switch to a different gun with more ammo. You just have to stand there like a dumbass, taking hits until you either find something useable or die. I guess you could roll around if you’re good as multitasking but that presents its own problems.

The dodge or roll move is important because you can quickly distance yourself from an enemy and also become unhittable while rolling. What sucks about this is that you have almost no control over which direction you’re rolling. If you’re really careful you can roll straight forward or straight back. Everything else is completely random, from the direction you roll to the direction you’re facing when you stand up.

Whenever you come across a locked door that you happen to have the key to, you have to dig the key out of your inventory to use it and usually every subsequent time you want to go through that door. It's such a small thing but come on. I have the key. You know I have the key. The key's not good anywhere else. Just USE the damn key. I don't have to tell you to keep breathing or to tie your shoes periodically. It's just a tedious waste of time.

The other thing about the inventory is that it pops up on screen when you press the buttons for it. If you don't do anything quick, like in two seconds, it disappears and resets at the first item, making you have to find whatever item you were looking for AGAIN. There's no reason why it has to be like this. It could pause the game when I'm using the inventory. It could have its own screen. It could let me see all of the items at once. It could stay on the screen until I tell it to go away. This is what the screen looks like during gameplay.

Notice anywhere where they might be able to squeeze in an inventory? Like maybe half the fucking screen?

The health bar in the game (and the thing that the game is pretty much named after) is basically a fear meter kind of like in Clock Tower. It starts out green and when it reaches solid red and you get hit, you die. Several things affect your fear differently for better or worse, or so it's alleged. I’ve read a lot of explanations on the internet regarding how the fear meter works and they all say different things, most of which I think are bullshit. I know one thing we can all agree on though is that getting shot increases your fear. The only way you can get healed significantly as far as I’ve experienced is when you reach an unknown prescribed spot in the game like when you switch characters or finish a large segment/puzzle.

It’s hard for me to be legitimately upset at the health system when I don’t know exactly what the official game manual says about it so I went to replacement docs and downloaded a PDF of it. What it said is that in order to lessen your fear, (heal yourself), you can sneak kill enemies, do well in gunfights, solve puzzles and discover important items.

Sneak kill enemies: Bullshit. I sneak killed two enemies in a row with a red fear meter and guess what color it was afterwards… It was fucking red.

Do well in gunfights: True. I saw it happen. But you know what? I didn’t need it. Know why? BECAUSE I DID WELL IN THE GUNFIGHT.

Solve puzzles: True, but that’s basically the established healing checkpoints that I mentioned.

Discover important items: True but essentially you discover important items by solving puzzles so…

Things that increase your fear besides bullets in your head are running out of ammo and being detected by enemies.

Running out of ammo: As if running out of ammo wasn’t bad enough in and of itself, they have to punish you for it?

Being detected by enemies: Yes, sometimes it’s possible to pull off a sneak kill but most of the time it’s not. And yes, the enemies are probably going to “detect” me when I shoot several bullets right in their fucking face!

All and all, I hate the lifebar. It’s deceptive, unreliable and needlessly complicated. But what’s worse is that the way it punishes or rewards you basically equates to strapping weights on a drowning person because they’re failing to stay afloat or strapping life vests to someone in the desert for doing a good job not drowning.

The ever-present drawback of fixed cameras in an action game is that you can’t see where the hell you’re going. Every time you’re about to transition to the next screen, you could literally be instantaneously catapulted into a gunfight with half a dozen enemies with absolutely no warning and then just die. That’s not entirely true. Usually your fear meter pops up when you’re about to get ambushed. But still, sometimes you’ll find yourself having to mow down wave after wave after wave of enemies that are presumably piling out of some clown car just off screen. You have no idea where they’re coming from or how many there are. If you want to sneak up on someone, you basically have to go around every corner sneaking in the assumption that someone’s going to be there.

There’s a ton of ways to die instantly in Fear Effect. Getting electrocuted, falling off of something, getting burned. A lot of these things are so petty and aren’t even identifiable as deathtraps until you kill yourself with them. This game is a real dick. It just loves to sucker punch you with endless instakill scenarios, a lot of them coming out of fucking nowhere with no warning or explanation so you’d have to be precognizant just to not die. Diffuse the bomb! Run from the explosion! Jump quick! Now! Now! Now! Escape the guards! Look out! Faster! Switching characters! Everyone’s shooting at you! Watch out for the water! Don’t shoot that! Boom! Oh, look at that! Ha ha! You died! Try again, asshole! I'm suddenly reminded of this.

There are parts in the game that slow to a snail’s pace just because you’re constantly having to reload the game, play to the shitty death part and try again by killing yourself there enough times until you can figure out what the hell it wants you to do there. (If you watched that first video, that wasn’t even all of them.

The same step here/don’t step here puzzle keeps reappearing I don’t even know how many times. They work so great too with the terrible depth perception and finicky controls.

Yeah, this is about what that looks like to me.

At the end, you descend into hell to defeat the King of Hell. (Honestly I didn’t see it coming.) Out of the three characters, one is already dead and now you have to choose who to play as and who dies since they’re having a disagreement about how to proceed. I chose to play as the girl, not because I supported her ideals but because I knew she had more guns and ammo at the time… Also two arms.

Not so good for dual-wielding. I was also mystified as to how he even reloaded his guns. I didn’t know at the time that there was a different boss depending on who you chose. The guy’s boss is actually a lot easier. Hana’s boss however is a combat nightmare. The only way you can hurt him is by burning paper money that randomly appears. (I have no idea.) As I’ve already explained, having to use the inventory in battle is like trying to trim your toenails by kicking a big rock repeatedly. So basically survive long enough to grab the money, maneuver yourself into the always tiny interaction zone next to a torch, quickly find the money in your inventory while being raped and select it before the inventory disappears. Even after I could accomplish all of that, it would most of the time fail for reasons I’ll never understand. The only thing I could conjecture is that it was because I got hit right before using it but it’s not like I have any control over that!